Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész Page B

Anyone who considers a poet to be a voyeur of horrors and, in a shrill falsetto, forbids him to write poetry after Auschwitz. Is that it?
    I am inclined to the view that if one talks about art and dictatorship, one can’t avoid Adorno’s precept
.
    “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But why are we speaking about this in connection with
The Union Jack
, which doesn’t even mention Auschwitz?
    Our discussion is not just about
The Union Jack
but about your life, which you are continually reformulating. Why? “What experience is for—that’s another question, I reflectedlater … Who sees through us? Living, I reflected, is done as a favour to God,” you write
.
    Writes the narrator of
The Union Jack
, whom you shouldn’t confuse with me, who is putting the words in his mouth. But what has that to do with Adorno?
    Just that you insert an otherwordly, metaphysical element between Adorno’s sentence and your own sentences, or in plain language, you speak about God where Adorno only sees ignominy
.
    You know, these are very ticklish matters …
    OK, but then let me put it more simply: what is your response to Adorno’s famous—or maybe infamous—dictum?
    Look here, I learned a lot from Adorno’s writings about music, when those were being published in Hungary, but that was all: I never read anything else by him.
    You’re not answering my question. What is your opinion of Adorno’s renowned dictum “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”?
    Well, if I may give a straight answer, I consider that statement to be a moral stink bomb that needlessly pollutes air that is already rank enough as things are.
    That’s undeniably a straight answer. Would you care to justify
it?
    I can’t imagine how as keen an intellect as Adorno could suppose that art would renounce portraying the greatest trauma of the twentieth century. It’s true, though, that the industrialized murder of millions cannot serve as the basis for aesthetic pleasure, as it were, but surely that doesn’t mean one ought to regard the poetry of, say, Paul Celan or Miklós Radnóti as barbaric? That’s a sick joke, there are no other words for it. And as far as aesthetic “pleasure” goes, did Adorno expect these great poets to write bad poetry? The more you think about that unfortunate pronouncement, the more senseless it becomes. But what I see as truly harmful is the tendency that it reflects: a preposterously misconceived elitism that incidentally runs riot in other forms as well. What I am referring to is the assertion of an exclusive right to suffering, the appropriation, as it were, of the Holocaust. Oddly enough, that tendency concurs with the attitude of the advocates of the
“Schlußstrich”
—the “finishing touch” stance—the people who would reject having anything to do with the Auschwitz domain of experience and would limit it to a narrow group of people; the people who, with the demise of those who survived the death camps, consider the experience itself as being a dead memory, remote history.
    As a Judeo-German conflict that may be regarded as “done and dusted” with the payment of reparations and the erecting of memorials?
    In other words, as a purely political issue, although that is not the point. It’s precisely what differentiates theHolocaust (let’s stay with that generally accepted label) from all other genocides. I see only one serious problem that needs to be settled, which is whether the twentieth-century experience of concentration camps is a matter of universal or marginal relevance.
    We know that you think it is universal, but are you aware that in so doing you are—how should I put it?—stepping out of one cultural area and entering another?
    Could you be a bit clearer what you mean?
    Universality is a concept from Catholicism
.
    Oh, I see. A priest once said to me that God has no religion.
    You say in
Someone Else
that there is no way of getting to grips with Auschwitz unless we take God as